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Though IBM bought SoftLayer six months ago, that hasn't prevented Big Blue from quickly inking deals with third-party software providers to make its newly acquired cloud competitive with Amazon, Microsoft and other big rivals.

The latest step forward comes in the form of a Redis-as-a-Service tech courtesy of Redis experts Garantia Data.

Redis is an open-source, non-relational key-value store that holds all of its data in-memory. The tech is frequently compared to Memcached, and some argue that it is superior due to a broader support of datatypes, and its use of optimistic locking. The development of Redis is stewarded by VMware-spinoff Pivotal.

Redis Cloud is a hosted version of Redis that uses proprietary Garantia Data tech to handle administration operations such as setting up scaling and configuring failure recovery. Garantia also claims "we have built the service over an infinitely-scalable architecture which supports all Redis commands at any dataset size" – nothing in technology is infinite, aside from the number of fantasies described by $company_marketing_department.

The Redis Cloud service was announced by Garantia Data in a blog post on Wednesday, and means developers can access a Redis cluster hosted in SoftLayer's Dallas facility – a handy place for attaining good response times to both coasts of the US, versus Amazon and Microsoft's coastal bit barns.

"SoftLayer provides both bare metal and virtual servers in one IaaS. This means that your application has the best of both worlds: on the one hand it gets you performant dedicated hardware, and on the other hand it can use on-demand provisioning (to spillover bursts for example). That’s in fact exactly how we’re operating our service there, and this combo makes the platform quite a looker," wrote Garantia Data.

Developers may be interested to find that the hosted Redis Cloud is $79 per month for a gigabyte of data on SoftLayer – this matches Amazon Web Services's US regions, and undercuts Microsoft's Windows Azure ($108 per month). ®